An Italian court in Milan has found three Google executives guilty (and acquitted the fourth) of privacy violations, convicting them to suspended six-month sentences. The Google employees were sued over a video posted to Google in 2006, showing four youths bullying a kid with Down syndrome.
This decision sets a disconcerting legal precedent. As we wrote before, there are four Google executives implied in this case: David Drummond, Google’s senior vice president and chief legal officer; George Reyes, Google’s former chief financial officer; Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel; and a fourth unidentified Google employee. None of them have directly handled the video, and the video had been removed after Google received complaints; however, the prosecutors claim that Google should never have allowed the video to be posted in the first place.
David Drummond plans to appeal the verdict, summing it up nicely: "If individuals like myself and my Google colleagues who had nothing to do with the harassing incident, its filming or its uploading onto Google Video can be held criminally liable solely by virtue of our position at Google, every employee of any Internet hosting service faces similar liability."
Forcing service providers to police content uploaded by users is one thing (arguably wrong, but that's another matter), but sentencing employees of those service providers to jail over such content is at the very least bizarre and shows a blatant misunderstanding of how the Internet and various social content sharing services work. If not overturned, this decision might have long lasting consequences on all content-sharing services on the Internet.
*Update: Google wrote a blog post detailing the incident. From the post: